Criteria for the implementation of a strategy
lead scoring

As previously stated, lead scoring is based on certain criteria specific to the main “buyer persona” profile established by the company. These criteria essentially revolve around the information you collect from the leads. We include:

• Company information (B2B marketing);
• Prospect demographics;
• The lead’s online attitude;
• His commitment by email;
• The lead’s interest in the company on social networks;
• Spam detection.

For a score between 0 and 100, each of these criteria must guarantee an irrefutable probability of purchase by the prospect.

Socio-demographic data

When we talk about socio-demographic data, we are essentially referring to a person’s age, sex, region, occupation, and marital status. In our case, this is information about your leads that you collect through the various forms on your website. If this information allows you to determine your target and to personalize your marketing campaign for the sale, it must be used especially in the segmentation of your CRM base.

Assuming that each of your products is geared towards a specific demographic segment, it is even more important that you score negatively any prospect that does not fit that target profile. If, on the other hand, the information collected on a lead matches, mark it with positive points. You can even award extra points to prospects who fill out optional form fields.

Firmographic data

If your sales activity is categorized as b2b marketing, your target is definitely a company like yours. Firmographic data can then be considered as the equivalent of socio-demographic data in b2c marketing. In order to qualify your target as a potential customer or not and to help you in your lead scoring process, you can include questions in your forms to collect as much information as possible. Whether it’s size, type of business, turnover, location… Allowing you to award points to leads that fit your target and discard those that don’t.

The behavior of the online lead

It has been proven more than once that the attitude of a prospect on a site is very significant in his buying decision. It would therefore be ideal to study the behavioral history of former prospects who have become customers, i.e. how they have behaved in relation to the various contents of the site. For example, what offers they may have been interested in, which ones they downloaded, the type and number of pages they visited or the type of form they filled out. All this could be useful in lead scoring. It would indeed be wise to give more points to prospects visiting high yield pages and forms (pricing page, demo request…). The same goes for leads that visit your website 15 times while others visit 5 times in the same time.

However, if a lead stops working on your platform for a certain period of time, you might want to consider removing points from that lead. This behavior could be defined as a sudden disinterest of the prospect in your company.

The interest of the lead for your company through email

Just like your content, email is a crucial point in your inbound marketing strategy, the interest that your leads have in it is not negligible. However, simply subscribing to your newsletter is not conclusive from the lead in terms of purchase either. It is mainly by its email open rate and click rate that its intentions become clear. Knowing who opens and reads the contents of each email and then clicks on the offer links should make it easier for all your sales people to choose qualified leads. They certainly won’t have to waste time on fake lead nurturing leads. This commitment is therefore a valid pretext for giving prospects a positive rating.

Lead engagement with your social media strategy

If a lead has the habit of liking and sharing your tweets and Facebook posts, it means that he is really interested in your brand on social networks. This is obviously a huge commitment to your business. Quantitative metrics (number of positive reactions from the prospect, shares, comments…) are especially good indicators for lead scoring. The score would be relatively higher for a qualified prospect with a strong influence on social networks. They could even become your brand ambassador.

Leads in the spam category

To top it all off, watch out for leads classified as “spam”. One wonders how this is possible. There are indeed those prospects to whom you should systematically give a negative score. Typical examples are those whose responses to the forms do not fit the convention. Names and surnames of prospects without capital letters, as well as company names or other fields containing a succession of at least 4 letters according to the AZERTY layout.

Newly entered email addresses should also be compared with those of your customers. For example, if your inbound strategy targets a business as a prospect, it is obvious to expect a business address like exemple@entreprise.com. However, when you are confronted with Gmail and Yahoo addresses, it will be enough to reduce the number of score points compared to the others.